Hacker News: strstr

New comment by strstr in "Remote Attestation"

strstr — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 06:51:20 +0000

(I’ll bite and try to steelman) How does a typical user verify that they are running the intended secure software?

New comment by strstr in "A software engineering interview question I like: computing the median"

strstr — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 02:06:14 +0000

You can definitely do this without sorting.

QuickSelect is average case n, and is, roughly, quick sort where you throw away one of the sides each time and recurse on the other. This has a fat tail for cases where you pick a bad pivot (similar to quicksort), but you can median-of-medians your way out of that problem if someone cares. (Median of medians being where you subdivide the array into, say, 5 arrays, recursively compute the median on those, and pick the middle median as your pivot, which guarantees linear progress per iteration)

New comment by strstr in "A software engineering interview question I like: computing the median"

strstr — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 02:00:22 +0000

I used to translate classic interview questions into not-spoiled-on-the-internet ones by doing this kind of batch to incremental conversion. The count-the-islands one was fun but hard to fit into a 45minute interview.

Eventually most of those started getting spoiled too lol.

New comment by strstr in "A software engineering interview question I like: computing the median"

strstr — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 01:53:07 +0000

Who does a sort for this D:

New comment by strstr in "[dead]"

strstr — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 12:53:10 +0000

Title: Android 17 is here

Powering the next era of Confidential AI

strstr — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:44:59 +0000

Article URL: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/powering-the-next-era-of-confidential-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48495455

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by strstr in "Sergey Brin told Google staff that working 60 hours a week is the 'sweet spot'"

strstr — Sun, 31 May 2026 18:16:46 +0000

[2025]

New comment by strstr in "Investigating Split Locks on x86-64"

strstr — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:17:24 +0000

Split locks are weird. It’s never been obvious to me why you’d want to do them unless you are on a small core count system. When split lock detection rolled out for linux, it massacred perf for some games (which were probably min-maxing single core perf and didn’t care about noisy neighbor effects).

Frankly, I’m surprised split lock detection is enabled anywhere outside of multi-tenant clouds.

New comment by strstr in "The AI Vampire"

strstr — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:05:58 +0000

Popular blogger from roughly a decade ago. His rants were frequently cited early in my career. I think he’s fallen off in popularity substantially since.

New comment by strstr in "List animals until failure"

strstr — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 20:21:56 +0000

This is more of a typing game than anything else. It rejected “blackcapped chickadee” (wanted black-capped chickadee). Frankly that felt a bit tedious on a phone. Had to scrub through to correct and lost.

New comment by strstr in "The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]"

strstr — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 20:50:05 +0000

My suspicion is that the bot was a fairly standard chess bot, but the difficulties were set based on computation time. As airplane computers got better, it turned into a beast.

As a result, if you tried this on older planes, it might have been “easier”

New comment by strstr in "Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed"

strstr — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 01:29:14 +0000

For my personal usage of ai-studio, I had to use autohotkey to record and replay my mouse deleting my old chats. I thought about cooking up a browser extension, but never got around to it.

New comment by strstr in "LG TV's new software update installed MS Copilot, which cannot be deleted"

strstr — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 17:49:15 +0000

How much are my eyeballs worth over the lifetime of a TV?

In the race to the bottom, ads will outcompete others by pushing price lower. But how much lower?

Fractal Imaginary Cubes

strstr — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 19:08:43 +0000

Article URL: https://www.i.h.kyoto-u.ac.jp/users/tsuiki/icube/fractal/index-e.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45560864

Points: 63

# Comments: 8

New comment by strstr in "Google CTF 2025 – webz : Exploiting zlib's Huffman Code Table"

strstr — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 19:57:33 +0000

Legitimately, they are often too hard. Balancing the problems is quite challenging.

On top of that, the solutions often make the problems seem much intimidating than they are (not that they are easy). Most solutions involve a lot of “happenstance”, where someone tried something and it got an outcome that was useful, which they build on top of. This makes the solutions look crazy complicated (“how would i have ever thought of this!?”), when in reality they are Rube Goldberg machines built out of duct tape and baling wire.

I’ve only solved a few Google CTF problems, and one of them was the one I wrote, lol. That was nearly a decade ago though.

New comment by strstr in "AMD Turin PSP binaries analysis from open-source firmware perspective"

strstr — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 17:50:48 +0000

Fair enough! Just happens to be the one of two I need to read

New comment by strstr in "AMD Turin PSP binaries analysis from open-source firmware perspective"

strstr — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 05:48:01 +0000

Source for the ASP firmware is at https://github.com/amd/AMD-ASPFW.

It has a number of gaps, but it is mostly there. It doesn't build, it doesn't have source for some of the service calls iirc (SVC_.*), and the AGESA source isn't open (though a replacement is in progress, openSIL).

New comment by strstr in "Secure Boot, TPM and Anti-Cheat Engines"

strstr — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 21:01:31 +0000

In practice, it’s essentially infeasible to make a non-detectable virtualization stack. Timing is really really hard to match (as is everything else). You can edit the binary that’s doing the detection, but this is time consuming. Every new feature they push costs you time and will poison your hardware id.

You can go further by, say, requiring fTPMs that are on the SoC (super common these days for most recent consumer CPUs). If you can’t boot into linux without the PCRs reflecting your virtualization stack being in the boot chain, you’re cheat is quite detectable.

New comment by strstr in "Secure Boot, TPM and Anti-Cheat Engines"

strstr — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 19:41:22 +0000

That’s not intended to be possible for any reasonable TPM with a trustworthy ekcert.

New comment by strstr in "Secure Boot, TPM and Anti-Cheat Engines"

strstr — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 19:39:39 +0000

Allegedly some of the anticheats are configuring the IOMMU through Windows APIs (vanguard, faceit, and a smattering of chinese anticheats). It’s hard to find good public information though. They do some mix of blocking access and deliberately leaving some pages as bait (and monitoring iommu d-bits/faults)